THE CONTRIBUTION OF HUNGARY TO (...) CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP 11

Another combination of several different branches of classical studies can be seen in Jnos Gyrgy Szilgyi's work. Confidently at home in the world of both the monuments of classical art and the written sources, he published a collection of written sources of Greek art. This proved to be in several respects an unparal-lelled work in international scholarly literature and a penetrating study on the origins of Etruscan and Roman theatre as well as histrionic art." On the one hand he wrote elegant essays on the Pygmalion and on the Arachne myth of Ovid, an excellent treatise on Lucin, revealing him as a critic of an oppression, on the other he is the author of the first volume of series containing a scholarly description of all Greek vases to be found in Hungary.20 This series is part of a larger one, an international undertaking under the patronage of the Union Acadmique Internationale of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. He directed the Hungarian contribution to the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae. His chef d'uvre, nevertheless, is the monumental work on EtruscoCorinthian vase-painting. It was Szilgyi who perceived the importance of this rather ne-glected field of classical art and having meticulously analysed the full material which no one had done before he established a detailed chronology. This again was of great importance for classical archaeology in general, since on the basis of Szilgyi's painstaking chronology many other works could be dated.21

The main field of rpd Szab's activity has been the history of Greek sci-ence, especially mathematics. He was led to it by his research in early Greek phi-losophy. First he demonstrated that under the influence of Eleatic dialectics Greek mathematics became an axiomatic, deductive science, in this surpassing methodically oriental mathematics. As a next step Szab analysed the terminol-ogy of Greek mathematics and music, examined what common, or everyday, meaning lies behind the technical terms, how and why they became technical terms, and in doing so he could reveal important, but before him unrecognized details in the development of Greek mathematical thought.22 He, nevertheless did not neglect the study of literature either. As early as 1955 he pointed out that Achilleus is a tragic hero in the Iliad an idea picked up only in the last decades by C. MacLeod and R. Rutherford.23

The combination of the knowledge and methods of different branches of scholarship survived in the next generation, though not in all fields in the same way. The late Andrs Mcsy was not only well versed in all problems of Pan-nnia he wrote the article Pannnia in the aforementioned Realencyclopdie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft and wrote a book on Pannnia and Upper Moesia, as well as a number of learned papers but also developed a school of onomatology, i. e. on the research of names. These investigations, continued after his death by his pupils, are of considerable importance both for historians of the Roman Empire and for comparative philology.24

Research on Pannnia was and remains a field where Hungarians can always contribute to international scholarship, simply because soo much material is in